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Ian McShane has told The Big Issue how he benefitted in his teenage years from socialist rule but was glad to escape his home town.

In this weeks Big Issue, the veteran actor also talks candidly about his drinking problems, and the moment that changed his life.

I got on with everyone when I was 16, says McShane. Atschool there were all these groups you had the teddy boys, the swots. But I got on with them all. Im glad I got the f**k out of Manchester but you never escape your childhood.

Im glad I left, but you never escape your childhood

I love going back, he continues. I still see my oldest friends. And the odd ex-girlfriend I had when I was 16, which all seems very sweet now I look back on it.

I had a happy life there. I had the best of the NHS and free further education I was brought up in the first 15 years of socialist rule.

In this weeks Letter to My Younger Self, the Lovejoy star currently appearing in Jawbone and American Gods says that he recognisedthe significance of meeting his wife for the first time.

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The Big Issue has inspired the launch of 120 street papers globally, including sister titles in Australia, South Africa, Japan, Taiwan and Korea.

As soon as I saw her, 38 years ago, I thought, Aaah shit, Im in trouble,' he says.I wasnt looking for a long-term relationship so I did just go, oh Christ. You cant explain it. Love is what it is. If Id waited a moment longer I might have walked the other way.

If I could go back to any time in my life it would be just a week after we met. I was in LAX airport, leaving to go to Britain, thinking Ah, great girl, Ill be seeing her again in two weeks. And she suddenly turned up to say goodbye. I was sitting having a beer and she came up and said, Hello darling, I love you. I think thats one of my happiest memories.

Read more from Ian McShane on his alcoholismand relationship with his father inthis weeks Big Issue, on sale now

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Ian McShane: I had free further education under socialism - Big Issue

YouTubeProtests against the long national nightmare of socialism continue in Venezuela, as the death toll over the last month has risen to 37 and over the weekend demonstrators tore down a statue of Hugo Chavez, the former president who ushered in the era of chavismo, his Latin American flavor of socialism, or "Bolivarian socialism"the protests represent the inevitable end to any socialist experiment.

In his heyday, Chavez was heralded by a number of leftists in the West as a model of democratic socialism. After Chavez's 2013 death, filmmaker Michael Moore gushed over Chavez's nationalization of the oil industry. "He used the oil $ 2 eliminate 75% of extreme poverty, provide free health & education 4 all," Moore tweeted. U.K. Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn said Chavez showed the world that "the poor matter and wealth can be shared" and that he made massive contributions to Venezuela" and the world.

Chavez was succeeded by his vice president, Nicolas Maduro, who continued Chavez's policies sans the kind of charisma that blinded some to the incompetence of Chavez and the incoherence of Bolivarian socialism, and eventually without the high oil prices to subsidize profligate government spending either. Left to its own devices, the centralized planning of socialism has failed spectacularly in Venezuela.

America's favorite homegrown socialist, Bernie Sanders, once pointed to Venezuela as a model too.

"These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger," Sanders wrote in a 2011 op-ed. "Who's the banana republic now?"

Last year, the average Venezuelan living in extreme poverty lost 19 pounds amid mass food shortages largely created and then exacerbated by government price controls60 percent of Venezuelans said they had to skip at least one meal a day. Maduro joked that the "Maduro diet," as the government-induced starvation has been called, was leading to better sex, to the applause of government workers and party loyalists but few others. There have been shortages of food as well as goods like toilet paper, deodorants, condoms, and even beer.

Some hardline socialists have been more critical of Chavez, criticizing the Western left's infatuation with Chavez, who the Socialist Party of Great Britain complained did not really understand socialism. Their argument boiled down to the fact that, to paraphrase Rick & Morty, Chavez should be trying socialism with extra steps. The Socialist Worker condemned Maduro's slide to authoritarianism earlier this month, even though the authoritarianism started soon after Chavez first came to power. The idea that socialism can ever effectively exclude cronyists when it accumulates the kind of power to which cronyists are attracted is preposterous.

Sanders, when he ran for president last year, no longer brought up the Venezuelan example of socialism. Instead he leaned on Americans' misinformed view of Scandinavian countries as socialist paradises. But Scandinavian countries like Sweden have "deregulation, free trade, a national school voucher system, partially privatized pensions, no property tax, no inheritance tax, and much lower corporate taxes," as Johan Norberg wrote last year.

Western leftists should not be allowed to distance themselves from the spoiled fruits of socialism in Venezuela, which they embraced only a few years ago. Countries across South America welcomed different versions of socialism over the last two decades, often to praise in the West, and, as The Economist noted in its latest Democracy Index, South American voters have tired of this left-wing populism and are slowly returning to more sensible, right-of-center free market policies.

Free market policies also happen to be the best antidotes to the currently ascendant populism and economic authoritarianism, as they have the power to best mitigate the kind of economically poor conditions in which populism thrives in the first place.

Maduro, and diehard supporters, blame the United States for Venezuela's woes, an increasingly unbelievable assertion in the face of evidence to the contrary. Even ThinkProgress, in a piece on the catastrophe in Venezuela that manages to avoid mentioning socialism (or chavismo or Bolivarianism for that matter) a single time, dismisses Maduro's fever dreams of U.S. responsibility for Venezuela's self-inflicted economic and political wounds.

The opposition in Venezuela won control of the legislature in elections in 2015, which was followed by the Maduro government working diligently to consolidate power even further. Protesters in Venezuela have demanded early elections, while Maduro has proposed a new constitution protesters call a coup.

The imprisoned opposition leader Leopold Lopez has called for the protests to continue.

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Socialism: The View from Venezuela - Reason (blog)

Financial Times

Huawei mixes Silicon Valley drive with Chinese socialism Financial Times The vibe on the Huawei campus, spread out across two square miles in the city of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong, is more state-owned enterprise than Silicon ... and more »

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Huawei mixes Silicon Valley drive with Chinese socialism - Financial Times

The globalist elite play chess while the Islamists and Leftists/Socialists play checkers

The word globalism is often used in its narrowest context to mean global trade, which obscures its broader political intention to internationalize nation states and ultimately impose one-world government.

Similarly the word Islamism is often used in its narrowest context to mean a religion like any other which obscures its broader political intention to reestablish the caliphate and impose sharia law worldwide.

Both are supremacist, expansionist socio-political movements intent on world dominion.

Islamists like Globalists believe themselves and their supremacist tenets to be morally superior to all others. The Islamist cloaks his supremacy in religious fervor and the disingenuous conviction that Islam is a peaceful religion because peace to an Islamist means when all the world is Muslim.

The Globalist cloaks his supremacy in a parallel and equally disingenuous conviction that Globalism is tolerant because tolerance to a globalist means tolerating those who LOOK different, not those who THINK differently.

Both systems are tyrannical in their demand for absolute conformity to their proscribed rules of behavior - for Islamists it is religious sharia law and for globalists it is secular political correctness.

The Islamist and the Globalist are both soldiers in their parallel wars seeking totalitarian rule of the world. The difference between Islamists and Globalists is the difference between communism and socialism described by Ayn Rand:

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COMMUNISM AND SOCIALISM, EXCEPT IN THE MEANS OF ACHIEVING THE SAME ULTIMATE END: COMMUNISM PROPOSES TO ENSLAVE MEN BY FORCE, SOCIALISM BY VOTE. IT IS MERELY THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MURDER AND SUICIDE.

Islamism and Globalism appear to exist on opposite sides of the political spectrum but they share a common enemy - the nation state. Nationalism is the single greatest obstacle to the religious caliphate of Islamism and to the secular one-world government of Globalism. The ancient proverb The enemy of my enemy is my friend explains the counter-intuitive common cause and intersectional alliance between Islamists and Globalists today.

Disinformation is a deliberate tactic of war. The Islamist fiction that the annihilation of Israel will bring peace to the middle east is a unifying tactic of war designed to demonize Israel, manipulate public opinion, and garner intersectional support from left-wing liberal lemmings against Israel. Islamist disinformation has a name - TAQIYYA - lying in the service of Islam. It is a deceitful strategy that deflects attention from the Islamist end game of eliminating the left-wing liberal infidels who support them. Similarly, the disinformation campaign supporting the fiction that Socialism will bring justice to the United States also has a name - ALINSKIYYA - lying in the service of Socialism. The hippies and anarchists of the 60s did not go quietly into the night. They have reconstituted themselves as the professors, administrators, politicians, activist judges, and policy-makers adhering to well-defined Tavistock Institute principles of social engineering and mass indoctrination designed to disinform, destabilize, and destroy America from within. Whoever controls the information controls society - and whoever controls the educational curriculum controls the future.

Islamists and Globalists follow the same expansionist playbook codified by Saul Alinsky in his book Rules for Radicals, Rule #12:

PICK THE TARGET, FREEZE IT, PERSONALIZE IT, POLARIZE IT. DONT TRY TO ATTACK ABSTRACT CORPORATIONS OR BUREAUCRACIES. IDENTIFY A RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL. IGNORE ATTEMPTS TO SHIFT OR SPREAD THE BLAME.

Israel and America have been demonized, targeted, personalized, and polarized because both are unapologetic and unwavering in their commitments to their national sovereignty. The war against Israel and America is a war against nationalism. Israels right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state is actually being debated as is Americas right to exist as a sovereign democratic nation. The left-wing liberal narrative courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama has reformatted American education and American entertainment to reflect the dreams from his father - a Kenyan radical socialist who considered America an evil colonial power. The information war waged by the colluding mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment industry foments American self-loathing, demonizes President Donald Trump the symbol of America-first nationalism, and glorifies socialism, anti-semitism, and presents internationalism as the panacea that will bring social justice to the masses. Socialism has never worked in the long-run in any country in the world because as Margaret Thatcher pointed out Eventually you run out of other peoples money. Socialism has only had limited success in the short-run in very small homogenous populations because socialism and pluralism are antithetical to each other. Socialisms greatest success is in destroying a nations prosperity and in sacrificing individual citizens rights to government control. Ayn Rand explains that socialism even robs an individual of his right to exist:

SOCIALISM IS THE DOCTRINE THAT MAN HAS NO RIGHT TO EXIST FOR HIS OWN SAKE, THAT HIS LIFE AND HIS WORK DO NOT BELONG TO HIM, BUT BELONG TO SOCIETY, THAT THE ONLY JUSTIFICATION OF HIS EXISTENCE IS HIS SERVICE TO SOCIETY, AND THAT SOCIETY MAY DISPOSE OF HIM IN ANY WAY IT PLEASES FOR THE SAKE OF WHATEVER IT DEEMS TO BE ITS OWN TRIBAL, COLLECTIVE GOOD.

The essential question is WHY the Left is promoting communist values. The left-wing liberal agenda seeks to destroy the socio-political capitalist infrastructure of American democracy and transform it into a dependent socialist state with cradle to grave control by the government. Their strategy is to destroy the traditional American institutions of family, religion,, and education that promote independence, adulthood, individualism, and ego strength - all the qualities that made America great. The entire narrative of the Left is designed to induce regression through educational indoctrination and the media - as Hillary Clinton famously remarked they need an unaware compliant public. Unaware and compliant are the hallmarks of childhood. The sales pitch might sound good to a childish mind who is seduced by candy from a stranger but the adult mind understands the sinister end-game. Once the public is entirely dependent on the government they lose all individual rights and national sovereignty and the newly socialized state is poised to become part of an internationalized one-world government. That is the end-game of the globalist elite and the motivation for indoctrinating America toward socialism.

The problem is that the left-wing liberal lemmings are too arrogant to understand that they are participating in their own destruction - they are just the useful idiots. The Left has been indoctrinated to believe they are fighting for social justice when in fact they are helping to establish the dystopian nightmare of one-world government where there is no middle class, no upward mobility, no national sovereignty, and absolutely no individual freedoms. There is only the master ruling elite and the enslaved population who service them. The left-wing liberal lemmings should take a break from marching and resisting and start reading Bertrand Russells The Impact of Science on Society written in 1952. They will learn that their script was written 65 years ago by the globalist elites who dreamed of their own one-world government - a binary socio-political system of masters and slaves. The globalist elites New World Order was their personal self-serving answer to the Malthusian problem of the earth not having enough resources to sustain the population growth.

Tavistock Institute was exported to America after WWII with the specific purpose of indoctrinating Americans via education and the media - particularly television - the greatest vehicle for mass social engineering ever invented. The Hollywood glitterati and the protesting hoards should take a pause and understand there is no place for them in the New World Order - they are simply useful idiots who will be destroyed. The aristocratic Lord Bertrand Russell and the late David Rockefeller had no moral problem with eliminating the useless eaters anymore than Hitler had with exterminating Jews, Islamists with exterminating infidels, or the Chinese Emperors with burying their concubines alive to service them in the afterlife. The point is elitism is supremacist - there is no egalitarian respect for human life only the pretense of humanitarian considerations. The Left and the Islamists have common cause in trying to destroy America from within - but it is the globalist elites who finance and disingenuously facilitate both groups because the social chaos they each engender is a prerequisite for imposing globalist one-world government. For the globalist elite the Left and the Islamists are BOTH useful idiots. The globalist elite play chess while the Islamists and Leftists/Socialists play checkers.

Linda Goudsmit is a devoted wife, mother, and grandmother. She and her husband owned and operated a girls clothing store in Michigan for 40 years and are now retired on the beach in sunny Florida. Linda graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning a B.A. in English literature. Having a lifelong commitment to learning, she is an avid reader and observer of life. She has shared her thoughts, observations, and philosophy of behavior in her book DEAR AMERICA Whos Driving the Bus? Linda is currently working on a childrens book series titled Mimis STRATEGY that offers helpful problem solving techniques encouraging resourcefulness and critical thinking skills for kids.

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CONNECTING THE DOTS: ISLAMISM...SOCIALISM GLOBALISM - Canada Free Press

Liverpool fans hold up a banner with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn before the game against Southampton. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

Tradition has it that Liverpool FC stands for socialism, even while many of the legends who bestrode the Anfield turf quietly voted Tory because they liked the idea of lower taxes. The association goes back to Bill Shankly, whose line that The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. Its the way I see football, its the way I see life, became a slogan that sold a million T-shirts.

Shanklys socialism was practical rather than theoretical: he is remembered for declaring to a crowd that, Even Chairman Mao has never seen a greater show of Red strength, but moments earlier hed had to ask Brian Hall for the name of the Chinese leader.

So the Liverpool fans who produced a pro-Jeremy Corbyn banner at the match against Southampton yesterday were honouring a cherished part of the identity of the club. But the striking thing about the banner was how quaintly out-of-place it seemed at the club Liverpool has become, and indeed in the wider context of the Premier League.

Liverpool has changed even more than most clubs, the club of Shankly is now under its second set of American owners. The first set were leveraged buyout specialists, one of whom memorably compared Liverpool FC to another company that was once part of his portfolio, Weetabix.

The current owner, John Henry, decided to buy the club because it satisfied the criteria of an investment model that he had learned from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway.

That is to say, he recognised that Liverpool FC was (a) famous (b) cheap and (c) had a lot of obvious room for improvement. If we could acquire this for the debt, I really feel like we would be stealing this franchise, Henry wrote in an email to his co-investors.

No UK investor both understood the economic potential of the club and had the finance to invest. Henry and his group have seen Liverpools valuation increase by nearly a billion dollars since they bought it for $500 million in 2010.

There were three main factors behind that spectacular capital gain. Most important was the increase in the Premier Leagues income from new TV deals. Second was the building of a new main stand at Anfield, which was chiefly aimed at increasing the number of corporate seats. Third was the thorough rationalisation of how Liverpool were managed, through the introduction of statistical and mathematical methods into scouting and recruitment.

Its not fashionable to speak about Moneyball any more, and the word would probably have struck Shankly as an oxymoronic and faintly obscene piece of Newspeak, but it remains the most concise description of the ethos of the current Liverpool FC.

And most of the other Premier League clubs are run along similar lines. Some of the critics of the Corbyn banner argued that politics and football should not mix, but those critics are failing to grasp that the Premier League promotes a certain set of political values simply by its existence and example.

From its inception, when the richest clubs decided to break the link with the rest of the football pyramid so that they could take a greater share of the forthcoming boom in TV money for themselves, the Premier League has embodied the values of neoliberalism.

It has become Britains most successful cultural export, and probably its most globalised industry. Owned by foreign capital, dominated by talented foreign coaches and players, and compliant with up-to-date standards of political correctness, it stands for internationalisation, deregulation, conspicuous consumption, and free trade.

For years people have worried that the influx of vast sums of money into the game would break the emotional connection between the fans in the stands and the players on the field. With the average Premier League footballer now earning more than 100 times the average industrial wage, the days of players spending midweek evenings drinking with fans in working mens clubs have long gone.

It turns out that people still can empathise with what happens on the field, because that emotional connection never had anything to do with money in the first place. But you wonder how long the Premier League can continue to stand for values that the fans who fill its stadiums increasingly seem to be rejecting.

Whether the Corbynistas at Anfield or the Tories who seem to be in the majority elsewhere, it seems that the great majority these days would have some reason to hate the model of the Premier League a Murdoch-sponsored greed-fest where immigrants have already taken two-thirds of the jobs.

Perhaps the league can take comfort in the fact that people seem to be rather good at disconnecting their thinking about football from their thinking about politics. No other set of immigrants is as warmly received in England as talented football players. There are millions of football fans who cheer every week for foreign footballers, then vote for whichever party promises the harshest measures against immigration.

This might be why the Premier League still seems confident that they can win an exemption from the coming restrictions on employing immigrant labour. Many of the same people who scowl at the thought of Polish plumbers taking English jobs would nevertheless be delighted for Chelsea to sign Robert Lewandowski. In football at least, most people can still see that England for the English is a step in the wrong direction.

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Ken Early: Liverpool are a long way from socialism these days - Irish Times